A Blog About Making Culture

Social Hacking

While I'm really glad that smart people like Tim O'Reilly and Chris Anderson are enjoying t-shirt media hack, I'm realizing that the really terrifying thing is that everybody in my social circle knows what Goatse is.

But Tim's right, of course. The only thing bloggers love as much as a good old-fashioned pile-on is an inside joke. Ours is an influential and popular culture, but it's still full of memes that have never crossed over to traditional media such as television and print. (Star Wars Kid excepted.)

With things like Crying While Eating showing up on TV even more quickly in their life cycles, are we going to lose the chance to have web-geek-only inside jokes? Is everyone already going to know what we find amusing? And is getting our memes out there going to be as annoying as the radio show prank callers who get themeselves onto TV?